Too big for the boss to know?

Conservatives have long — and correctly — warned that the federal government is too big. Yet it keeps getting bigger.

And President Barack Obama, certainly no conservative, has significantly increased the federal government’s size despite loud objections from the right.

For example, the president pushed the big-government — and inaccurately titled — Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act through Congress in 2010 without a single Republican vote.

David Axelrod, who served as the president’s top political adviser during his first term, relentlessly championed that high-priority cause of the administration with rosy-scenario projections that are being increasingly exposed as fallacies.

However, Mr. Axelrod, now a commentator on MSNBC, finally appears to be grasping at least some of the perils of the super-sized, centralized authority in Washington. On Wednesday’s “Morning Joe,” he told host Joe Scarborough, “You know, we have a large government.”

He was merely delivering predictable “spin” on why President Obama purportedly didn’t know his Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative organizations for undue scrutiny.

Mr. Axelrod even cited this “prima facie evidence” that the president’s political team wasn’t behind it: “If anybody political was involved in this, they would say, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you nuts?’ ”

So who launched that IRS offensive against those conservative groups?

Mr. Axelrod said the culprits were “apparently some folks down in the bureaucracy.”

So why would “folks down in the bureaucracy” dare to take such rash, unauthorized action?

As for the president’s self-asserted lack of awareness about not just the IRS scandal but the scandals about his administration’s phony Benghazi cover stories and the Justice Department’s massive seizure of Associated Press staffers’ phone records, Mr. Axelrod said:

“Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government’s so vast.”

And part of being president is taking responsibility for your own administration’s misdeeds.